I had a hard time imagining anyone worshipping Damon Wilcox. Then again, if he and this Felicia had gotten married when Connor was still in high school, all this had happened some time ago. “Did she know about the whole…magic thing?”
“He told her. That’s a pretty big secret to keep from your wife, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to have much contact with the clan if he didn’t tell her. But she seemed to take it in stride. I don’t think he told her everything about the curse, though…just that there had been some tragedies in our family. But you could probably say that about most families.”
I thought that was pretty hard on Felicia, and not precisely fair. She deserved the truth, deserved to know what lay in store for her. I didn’t say anything, though, because I wanted to know what had happened to her. Well, the details. Since she wasn’t around now, it was pretty clear that the curse had hit her, just as it had every other wife of a Wilcox primus.
“Everything seemed fine for a few years. She was getting a practice going as a family counselor, and Damon got the associate professorship position here at Northern Pines. I was off at school in Tempe by then, so I wasn’t around to see them much except for a weekend here and there, but they seemed happy. Then Felicia got pregnant.”
Uh-oh. That did seem to be the death knell for the Wilcox wives.
Connor stared straight ahead as he spoke. I didn’t know if he was avoiding my gaze so he couldn’t see my own worry, or whether what was coming next was so painful that the only way he could tell it was without looking at me.
“It was January. I’d just gone back to ASU after winter break. I got a phone call one evening. I think it was a Thursday.” A shake of his head. “Like it matters what day of the week it was. There’d been a car accident. The roads were icy. She was driving home from her office when some tourist lost control at an intersection and T-boned her car. Just slammed right into the driver-side door. They got her to the hospital, but there wasn’t much they could do. She was gone, and the baby.”
My fingers tightened around the purse I held on my lap. A wave of pity rolled over me. Feel sorry for Damon Wilcox? In that moment I did.
“He changed after that. Sold the house they’d been living in, bought this place, and moved way out here. And he started obsessing over how he could end the curse forever.”
I reached over and squeezed Connor’s arm. Briefly, not enough to distract him from his driving, but merely to let him know I was there.
For just a second or two the tight set to his mouth softened a bit. But then I could see his jaw tense again as he said, “That was when he started obsessing about you. The first time he brought it up — it was over the summer, about five years ago now — I told him he was crazy, that he needed to let it go. I mean, bad enough that he should contemplate such a thing at all, considering you were only sixteen at the time and he was past thirty.”
“Definitely disgusting,” I agreed. It actually made my flesh crawl to realize Damon Wilcox had been thinking of me that way even when I was underage.
“Pretty much what I said. And he told me that modern scruples shouldn’t be coming into it, and besides, of course he wouldn’t touch you until you were twenty-one and your prima powers had begun to awaken. Then he sort of dropped it for a while, and since I was busy with school, I let it go as well.” At last he looked over at me. Quickly, so he wouldn’t endanger us while driving or anything, but enough so I could see the warmth in his eyes. “Besides, soon after that I began dreaming of you, and I realized that eventually Damon’s plans were going to come crashing down around him anyway.”
“So you knew all along who I was?” I demanded. “That’s not fair. I never got to see your face in my dreams. Not that I would’ve known who you were, even if I’d been able to get a good look at you.”
“Well, I did know what you looked like, since Damon had people surveilling you for some time.”
Now, that was creepy. “You’re kind of freaking me out, Connor.”
“I thought you should know the truth.”
Just another way he was so very different from his brother. Damon seemed to have only a casual acquaintance with the truth, as far as I could tell. “So, um…surveilling me how, exactly?”
“No family members. Your elders would have sniffed out a Wilcox the second he or she crossed the wards you have set up. But being a college professor does give you access to a bunch of civilians, students who go on day trips all over the place, including Jerome. It didn’t have to sound sinister or anything — he could do something as simple as mention he was thinking of vacationing there, and could they take some photos so he could make a decision that wasn’t based on a B&B’s website marketing copy? You were out in plain view, working at your aunt’s store on the weekends. It was easy to get a picture.”